How would you envision a 21st century USSR?

Assuming the Soviet Union remained an entity to the present day what kind of nation would it be? Still a superpower? Would China sill have risen like it did over the last 30 years?
 
Assuming the hardliner coup never takes place the USSR was going to otl reform into the the Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics which was tested with a referendum showing over 77% support for and would have prevented wide scale collapse and only have not had the Baltic moldovia georga and Arminia.
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The earlier the POD, the better off it is ITTL. What would said POD be, Stalin never seizing power and going on with his purges, someone other than Khrushchev taking over after his death, Khrushchev having fewer crazy ideas (while keeping his good ones), Kosygin being more successful, Ryzhkov takes over after Chernenko instead of Gorbachev and going off in roughly the same course while not executing some of his stupider policies, like the anti-alcohol campaign?
 
Can you explain? You mean nuclear related? China very recently was seen as somewhat of a pollution disaster until some recent measures they took.
Well for starters, the USSR drained the Aral Sea to farm cotton...

Their economic bottom line, in so far as the USSR actually had one, was almost entirely dependant on their fossil fuel industry, as was most of their power generation.

Environmental protections essentially didn't exist in the USSR.
 
Well for starters, the USSR drained the Aral Sea to farm cotton...

Their economic bottom line, in so far as the USSR actually had one, was almost entirely dependant on their fossil fuel industry, as was most of their power generation.

Environmental protections essentially didn't exist in the USSR.

Is that much different than present day Russia which still remains a non-insignificant power. If anything perhaps there'd have been more imperative to reform environmentally had the union stayed together.
 
Imagine modern day Russia but bigger, and with fewer environmental regulations.
Well, I can't speak for the plants/trees (I'm not the Lorax), but IIRC the fall of the USSR led to a major rise in poaching and illegal logging, with animals like the Saiga Antelope and the Siberian Tiger suffering the consequences.
 
What makes you think a surviving USSR would be more hostile to environmental regulations than modern Russia is?
A possible reason could be that it's an even bigger producer/exporter of fossil fuels than OTL Russia, since IIRC Turkmenistan in particular at least has a TON of natural gas, to the point where it's almost free there. I could be wrong though.
 
What makes you think a surviving USSR would be more hostile to environmental regulations than modern Russia is?
Because it historically had none and actively suppressed its environmental movement. Russia meanwhile has environmental regulations, they just aren't enforced due to endemic corruption and the difficulty of policing such a vast frontier.

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Another factor would be if the Cold War is also still a thing. Modern day Russia isn't above occasionally entertaining climate accelerationist fantasies. A hardline USSR deciding that it wants to BBQ America and win the Cold War by default would be ... scary but not impossible.
 
A possible reason could be that it's an even bigger producer/exporter of fossil fuels than OTL Russia, since IIRC Turkmenistan in particular at least has a TON of natural gas, to the point where it's almost free there. I could be wrong though.
They aren't in the top 96 oil producers in the world, but four other Central Asian "stan" countries are, so you may just be mistaken about which one.

This shows in 2019, Russia produced 10,800,000 barrels of oil a day (3rd most in the world). Kazakhstan produced 1,595,199 (16th in the world), Uzbekistan produced 52,913 (50th in the world), Kyrgyzstan produced 1,000 (88th in the world), and Tajikistan produced 180 (95th in the world).
Because it historically had none and actively suppressed its environmental movement. Russia meanwhile has environmental regulations, they just aren't enforced due to endemic corruption and the difficulty of policing such a vast frontier.

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Another factor would be if the Cold War is also still a thing. Modern day Russia isn't above occasionally entertaining climate accelerationist fantasies. A hardline USSR deciding that it wants to BBQ America and win the Cold War by default would be ... scary but not impossible.
I think you are painting with way too broad a brush. I'd love to see your sources on the USSR standing against all environmental movements. In the early 1930s that seems true, most were forcibly closed at the height of Stalin's terror. What about the All-Russia Society for the Protection of Nature? A group founded in 1924 that survived Stalin's early '30s purges and continued to exist the whole length of the Soviet Union. We are talking about the same country over the course of a century from the USSR's founding to now. Environmentalism emerged as a major force in the US in the '60s and '70s, with periods of waxing and waning power and opposition since then.

Just saying "USSR had no environmentalism" is absurd, and so is pretending that Russia's environmental regulations would only have spawned from the Russian Federation. Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin aren't hardcore environmentalists and neither of them spearheaded anything on that front that would make their government exceptional.
 
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They aren't in the top 96 oil producers in the world, but three other Central Asian "stan" countries are, so you may just be mistaken about which one.

This shows in 2019, Russia produced 10,800,000 barrels of oil a day (3rd most in the world). Kazakhstan produced 1,595,199 (16th in the world), Uzbekistan produced 52,913 (50th in the world), Kyrgyzstan produced 1,000 (88th in the world), and Tajikistan produced 180 (95th in the world).
I said natural gas, not oil.
 
Depends. It either becomes a sort of North Korea kind of state only larger and scarrier, or it becomes something like China. I'm guessing that you would probably see the Russian people fare better under communism, at least in terms of health.
 
Just saying "USSR had no environmentalism" is absurd, and to pretend that Russia's environmental regulations would only have spawned from the Russian Federation. Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin aren't hardcore environmentalists and neither of them spearheaded anything on that front that would make their government exceptional.
I didn't say it had no environmentalism I said it had no (effective) environmental regulations. Soviet environmental sciences were actually pretty advanced, rather they had difficulties getting regulations passed that couldn't be negated by an economic planner's say so. And it was only with glastnost* that Soviet environmentalism transformed from an academic movement into a mass movement.

Yeltsin was desperate enough for foreign cash and legitimacy to sign OECD minimum recommendations into law. As for Putin, he throws the occasional bone to the environmental movement that emerged during glastnost, and occasionally uses environmental regulations as a club with which to beat the oligarchs he's on bad terms with.

What about the All-Russia Society for the Protection of Nature? A group founded in 1924 that survived Stalin's early '30s purges and continued to exist the whole length of the Soviet Union.
But how much influence did it have in the halls of power?


*and Glastnost is arguably what killed the USSR so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 
Wow, thanks for linking that source! Looking at World Totals, Russia and the former Soviet Central Asian countries collectively have over 30.6% of the world's natural gas reserves. That's almost twice as much as Iran, who has the second most in the world with 17.8%. They would also have about 6.675% of the world's oil, putting them in 6th globally between Iraq and Kuwait.

I didn't say it had no environmentalism I said it had no (effective) environmental regulations. Soviet environmental sciences were actually pretty advanced, rather they had difficulties getting regulations passed that couldn't be negated by an economic planner's say so. And it was only with glastnost* that Soviet environmentalism transformed from an academic movement into a mass movement.

Yeltsin was desperate enough for foreign cash and legitimacy to sign OECD minimum recommendations into law. As for Putin, he throws the occasional bone to the environmental movement that emerged during glastnost, and occasionally uses environmental regulations as a club with which to beat the oligarchs he's on bad terms with.


But how much influence did it have in the halls of power?


*and Glastnost is arguably what killed the USSR so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
From what I read on that society I mentioned, they seemed to spend most their time lobbying for protections and trying to catch poachers and loggers, and sometimes the officials who they bribed to do so. Seems like they were seen as harmless by the state and that implies a lack of power. My info comes from here and here.

Glasnost was a real Catch-22. Dismantling a totalitarian state is incredibly complicated, empowering dissidents who have been oppressed for a long time was always going to be. I think the failed coup is what made that untenable, once the threat of military hardliners taking over and undoing everything, there was little hope of continuing to just reform the status quo.
 
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